designed in dorset

How to tell if somebody loves somebody.

I hate typing this kind of this into google. There are too many myspace-esk 'love tests' that mean nothing. And too many blog posts from people dealing with their own breakups/tiffs/fallouts/sorrow which tease you as you think there is a load of interesting text, only to find out it is just waffle...

The general consensus is that this is love... - starting with "Somebody loves you if they pick an eyelash off of your face or wet a napkin and apply it to your dirty skin" almost every time. Consistency or what!?

I also found an interesting fact that the early stages of Love can be linked to aspects of mental illness...

"Neurochemical and brain scanning investigations have shown a considerable overlap between ‘the brain in love’ and ‘the brain in the throes of mental illness,’” writes Tallis. When people fall in love, they frequently exhibit symptoms that fall under several categories of mental illness.

People in a manic state, for example, show an abnormally heightened mood, self esteem, and tend to do out-of-the-norm things, like giving extravagant gifts." -2005 study published in 'The Psychologist' - publication of the British Psychological Society [1]

This is an interesting paper on Romantic love, or as the Greeks called it ‘eros’. Turns out that in 2000 two British neuroscientists, Bartels and Zaikai, performed MRIs on 17 students all madly in love. The couples were shown images of each others faces and an area of the brain called the ‘cudate nucleus’ “lit up”. Shame we don’t have an MRI machine...

But still Im taking all of this with a pinch of salt.

It is a very hard subject to get any concrete information on. One of life’s questions…you would have thought it would have been answered by now.